Top 10 Microcontroller Articles of 2012

Good Grief – we're already half way through January 2013 – it seems only a couple of days ago that we were celebrating the holiday season – now the whole of 2012 gives the impression of being only a dream.

In reality, of course, a tremendous number of things occurred in 2012, not the least that we had some amazingly good articles here on Microcontroller Designline. So, I thought it would be interesting to see which were the most-viewed microcontroller-related articles from 2012, including "How To" design articles, news items, product pieces, and commentary offerings.

The following "Top 10" mind-blowing articles are presented in reverse order from #10 to #1 based on the number of times they were viewed in 2012.

You say "a tremendous number of things occurred in 2012"? I would say that this year will be even more dramatic with economical and environment collisions etc. I try to still be more optimistic but it's getting harder, day after day.. travel insurance

As for "How to connect a microcontroller to an FPGA," I think engineers have been doing that forever. I've used interfaces ranging from I2C (micro as master, FPGA as slave) to standard UARTs to the SiLabs 8051's EMIF (which lets you use FPGA BRAM as XDATA memory for the micro, among other things) to PPC and ARM peripheral buses.
In other words, whatever.

ARM's Cortex-A profile pushes beyond the boundaries of anyone's definition of "microcontroller"; IMHO any CPU that has an MMU exceeds that classification.
The Programmer's Guide is certainly an excellent document -- but not for the faint-of-heart; ARM expertise can only be acquired with a long apprenticeship...